Read this article about BrightSpring Health Services, one of our finalists, in the category Operational Excellence CEO of the Year Award, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

In September 2016, Jon Rousseau was named president and chief executive officer of ResCare, Inc., a privately held company with a longstanding history of serving the most complex and vulnerable populations in the country. For 40+ years, ResCare provided nonclinical support services to people of all ages with complex medical or social needs. Today, the company has rebranded itself as BrightSpring Health Services. The new name reflects its successful repositioning as a leader in the health care and home health industry, with expanding its services to include not only nonclinical services, but clinical capabilities in a variety of businesses, such as hospice, home health, neurorehabilitation, autism and pharmacy. Over the past two years, the company has made significant investments in its people, culture, process and technology – while accelerating its financial growth – executing with a continuous improvement, service excellence and growth-minded strategy.

Rousseau has led a dramatic company transformation that includes rebranding and reinventing the organization to position it for the future of health care. The transformation is underpinned by many tangible milestones to create an unprecedented and differentiated platform to support innovative solutions that improve health outcomes and lower costs for complex populations and payer systems. At the end of 2018, the company was on pace to grow revenues by 10% to $2 billion. However, earlier this month, BrightSpring announced a synergistic new partnership with PharMerica Corporation, creating a uniquely positioned diversified health care services company with comprehensive care capabilities across clinical, non-clinical and pharmacy services in multiple care settings. As CEO over the new enterprise with a combined revenue of over $4 billion, Rousseau will join the two companies together to become a leading provider of home and community-based health and pharmacy services for high-need and medically-complex populations, serving over 300,000 clients daily across the U.S.

Rousseau joined BrightSpring with a distinguished career as a senior health care executive. He has a demonstrated track record of success at multiple Fortune 500 health care companies and as a private equity and investment banking professional. Rousseau previously served as executive vice president of Kindred Healthcare and president of Kindred Rehabilitation Services, one of the largest diversified rehabilitation services company in the U.S. Prior to that, he was president of the Care Management Division and Kindred at Home. Before Kindred, Rousseau held several senior leadership positions at other market-leading health care product and technology companies, including vice president of global marketing, strategy and commercial development at Mylan and global senior director of the continuous glucose monitoring franchise with Medtronic. For the first part of his career, Rousseau worked at Friedman Fleischer & Lowe LLC, a leading private equity firm and at Morgan Stanley in investment banking. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and his A.B. degree from Princeton University. He has received numerous awards and certifications and is frequently requested as a keynote speaker. BrightSpring was named a 2018 “Business of the Year” finalist. Rousseau has also been recognized as one of the “20 People to Know: Health Care”.